New releases

Particularly impactful career paths you might have overlooked

Blog post by · Published April 26th, 2024

The idea this week: there are many potentially high-impact career paths — so don’t limit your options too soon.

Which careers are best for helping others? It’s a simple-sounding question, but it’s not so simple to answer.

We’ve written about this question extensively, and it’s a key part of our career guide. We also have a list of the highest-impact career paths our research has found so far.

Readers naturally focus most on the top of the list. But while we want readers to consider our top-ranked paths (and we think it’s good to be transparent about what we think are the best opportunities to do good), you shouldn’t underrate the personal factors that will make one path or another a better fit for you — both in terms of social impact and personal satisfaction.

So this week we wanted to highlight a few paths and career steps (in no particular order) that we think people should consider if they want to have a lot of impact:

1. Journalism

Public discourse shapes the way societies understand and react to key problems in the world, and journalists have a significant role in shaping it. So if you can become an influential journalist, you might be able to have a big impact by drawing attention to pressing world problems, how to solve them, and how to generally think well about these issues.

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#185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals

Podcast by and · Published April 18th, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Lewis Bollard — director of the Farm Animal Welfare programme at Open Philanthropy — about the promising progress and future interventions to end the worst factory farming practices still around today.

They cover:

  • The staggering scale of animal suffering in factory farms, and how it will only get worse without intervention.
  • Work to improve farmed animal welfare that Open Philanthropy is excited about funding.
  • The amazing recent progress made in farm animal welfare — including regulatory attention in the EU and a big win at the US Supreme Court — and the work that still needs to be done.
  • The occasional tension between ending factory farming and curbing climate change.
  • How AI could transform factory farming for better or worse — and Lewis’s fears that the technology will just help us maximise cruelty in the name of profit.
  • How Lewis has updated his opinions or grantmaking as a result of new research on the “moral weights” of different species.
  • Lewis’s personal journey working on farm animal welfare, and how he copes with the emotional toll of confronting the scale of animal suffering.
  • How listeners can get involved in the growing movement to end factory farming — from career and volunteer opportunities to impactful donations.
  • And much more.

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#184 – Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT

Podcast by and · Published April 11th, 2024

Many of you will have heard of Zvi Mowshowitz as a superhuman information-absorbing-and-processing machine — which he definitely is.

As the author of the Substack Don’t Worry About the Vase, Zvi has spent as much time as literally anyone in the world over the last two years tracking in detail how the explosion of AI has been playing out — and he has strong opinions about almost every aspect of it. So in today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin asks Zvi for his takes on:

  • US-China negotiations
  • Whether AI progress has stalled
  • The biggest wins and losses for alignment in 2023
  • EU and White House AI regulations
  • Which major AI lab has the best safety strategy
  • The pros and cons of the Pause AI movement
  • Recent breakthroughs in capabilities
  • In what situations it’s morally acceptable to work at AI labs

Whether you agree or disagree with his views, Zvi is super informed and brimming with concrete details.

Zvi and Rob also talk about:

  • The risk of AI labs fooling themselves into believing their alignment plans are working when they may not be.
  • The “sleeper agent” issue uncovered in a recent Anthropic paper, and how it shows us how hard alignment actually is.
  • Why Zvi disagrees with 80,000 Hours’ advice about gaining career capital to have a positive impact.
  • Zvi’s project to identify the most strikingly horrible and neglected policy failures in the US, and how Zvi founded a new think tank (Balsa Research) to identify innovative solutions to overthrow the horrible status quo in areas like domestic shipping, environmental reviews, and housing supply.
  • Why Zvi thinks that improving people’s prosperity and housing can make them care more about existential risks like AI.
  • An idea from the online rationality community that Zvi thinks is really underrated and more people should have heard of: simulacra levels.
  • And plenty more.

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Christian Ruhl on why we’re entering a new nuclear age — and how to reduce the risks

Podcast (80k After Hours) by and · Published March 2024

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Christian Ruhl discuss underrated best bets to avert civilisational collapse from global catastrophic risks — things like great power war, frontier military technologies, and nuclear winter.

They cover:

  • How the geopolitical situation has changed in recent years into a “three-body problem” between the US, Russia, and China.
  • How adding AI-enabled technologies into the mix makes things even more unstable and unpredictable.
  • Why Christian recommends many philanthropists focus on “right-of-boom” interventions — those that mitigate the damage after a catastrophe — over traditional preventative measures.
  • Concrete things policymakers should be considering to reduce the devastating effects of unthinkable tragedies.
  • And on a more personal note, Christian’s experience of having a stutter.

Who this episode is for:

  • People interested in the most cost-effective ways to prevent nuclear war, such as:
    • Deescalating after accidental nuclear use.
    • Civil defence and war termination.
    • Mitigating nuclear winter.

Who this episode isn’t for:

  • People interested in the least cost-effective ways to prevent nuclear war, such as:
    • Coating every nuclear weapon on Earth in solid gold so they’re no longer functional.
    • Creating a TV show called The Real Housewives of Nuclear Winter about the personal and professional lives of women in Beverly Hills after a nuclear holocaust.
    • A multibillion dollar programme to invent a laser beam that could write permanent messages on the Moon, and using it just once to spell out #nonukesnovember.

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Particularly neglected causes you could work on

Blog post by · Published March 15th, 2024

The idea this week: working on a highly neglected or pre-paradigmatic issue could be a way to make a big positive difference.

We usually focus on how people can help tackle what we think are the biggest global catastrophic risks. But there are lots of other pressing problems we think also deserve more attention — some of which are especially highly neglected.

Compared to our top-ranked issues, these problems generally don’t have well-developed fields dedicated to them. So we don’t have as much concrete advice about how to tackle them, and they might be full of dead ends.

But if you can find ways to meaningfully contribute (and have the kind of self-directed mindset necessary, doing so could well be your top option.

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Risks of stable totalitarianism

If we put aside risks of extinction, one of the biggest dangers to the long-term future of humanity might be the potential for an ultra-long-lasting and terrible political regime. As technology advances and globalisation and homogenisation increase, a stable form of totalitarianism potentially could take hold, enabled by improved surveillance, advanced lie detection, or an obedient AI workforce. We’re not sure how big or tractable these risks are, but more research into the area could be highly valuable. Read more.

2. Long-term focused space governance

Humanity’s future,

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#183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more

Podcast by and · Published March 14th, 2024

In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks for a fourth time with listener favourite Spencer Greenberg — serial entrepreneur and host of the Clearer Thinking podcast — about a grab-bag of topics that Spencer has explored since his last appearance on the show a year ago.

They cover:

  • How much money makes you happy — and the tricky methodological issues that come up trying to answer that question.
  • The importance of hype in making valuable things happen.
  • How to recognise warning signs that someone is untrustworthy or likely to hurt you.
  • Whether Registered Reports are successfully solving reproducibility issues in science.
  • The personal principles Spencer lives by, and whether or not we should all establish our own list of life principles.
  • The biggest and most harmful systemic mistakes we commit when making decisions, both individually and as groups.
  • The potential harms of lightgassing, which is the opposite of gaslighting.
  • How Spencer’s team used non-statistical methods to test whether astrology works.
  • Whether there’s any social value in retaliation.
  • And much more.

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Expression of interest: product manager

Blog post by · Published March 10th, 2025

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems.

In 2025, we are planning to focus especially on helping explain why and how our audience can help society safely navigate a transition to a world with transformative AI.

Over a million people visit our website each year, and thousands of people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. Surveys conducted by our primary funder, Open Philanthropy, show that 80,000 Hours is one of the single biggest drivers of talent moving into work related to reducing global catastrophic risks.

Our most popular pieces get over 10,000 unique visitors each month, and are among the most important ways we help people shift their careers towards higher-impact options.

The role

As a senior product manager, you would:

  • Research, propose, and implement product innovations to make the 80,000 Hours website more useful and delightful for talented people interested in having a high impact career
    • For example, you could lead on refreshing the site’s visual identity to make it more appealing, or creating and integrating a custom LLM to help users navigate the content.
  • Lead on strategies for gathering and using user feedback and industry research to inform product decisions and assess their success
  • Work with our developers and content team to implement product changes,

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Expression of interest: Writer and writer-researcher

Blog post by · Published March 15th, 2024

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. Since being founded in 2011, we have helped:

  • Popularise using your career to ambitiously pursue impact while thinking seriously about cause and intervention prioritisation
  • Grow the fields of AI safety, AI governance, global catastrophic biological risk reduction, and global catastrophic risk reduction capacity building (among others)
  • Fill hundreds of roles at many of the most impactful organisations tackling the worlds’ most pressing problems

Over a million people visit our website each year, and thousands of people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. Surveys conducted by our primary funder, Open Philanthropy, show that 80,000 Hours is one of the single biggest drivers of talent moving into work related to reducing global catastrophic risks.

Our most popular pieces are read by over 1,000 people each month, and they are among the most important ways we help people shift their careers towards higher-impact options.

The roles

We’re listing these roles together because there’s a lot of overlap in what they’ll focus on, and we suspect some of the same candidates could be strong fits for both.

The main difference is that the writer role focuses more on the craft of writing compelling and informative pieces for the audience, and the writer-researcher role focuses more on supporting the knowledge base that informs the pieces.

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#182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more

Podcast by and · Published March 8th, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer — senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals — about Rethink Priorities’s Moral Weight Project.

They cover:

  • The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals — and the limitations of that approach.
  • Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions.
  • The results that most surprised Bob.
  • Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table.
  • Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare.
  • Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth.
  • The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights.
  • How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation.
  • And plenty more.

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#181 – Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond

Podcast by and · Published March 1st, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Laura Deming — founder of The Longevity Fund — about the challenge of ending ageing.

They cover:

  • How lifespan is surprisingly easy to manipulate in animals, which suggests human longevity could be increased too.
  • Why we irrationally accept age-related health decline as inevitable.
  • The engineering mindset Laura takes to solving the problem of ageing.
  • Laura’s thoughts on how ending ageing is primarily a social challenge, not a scientific one.
  • The recent exciting regulatory breakthrough for an anti-ageing drug for dogs.
  • Laura’s vision for how increased longevity could positively transform society by giving humans agency over when and how they age.
  • Why this decade may be the most important decade ever for making progress on anti-ageing research.
  • The beauty and fascination of biology, which makes it such a compelling field to work in.
  • And plenty more.

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The case for taking your technical expertise to the field of AI policy

Blog post by · Published March 1st, 2024

The idea this week: technical expertise is needed in AI governance and policy.

How do you prevent a new and rapidly evolving technology from spiralling out of control? How can governments, policymakers, and civil society ensure that we’re making the best decisions about how to integrate artificial intelligence into our society?

To answer these kinds of questions, we need people with technical expertise — in machine learning, information security, computing hardware, or other relevant technical domains — to work in AI governance and policy making.

Of course, there are roles for people with many different backgrounds to play in AI governance and policy. Experience in law, international coordination, communications, operations management, and more are all potentially valuable in this space.

But we think people with technical backgrounds may underrate their ability to contribute to AI policy. We’ve long regarded AI technical safety research as an extremely high-impact career option, and we still do. But this sometimes gives readers the impression that if they’ve got a technical background or aptitude, it’s the main path for them to consider if they want to help prevent an AI-related catastrophe.

But this isn’t necessarily true.

Technical knowledge is crucial in AI governance for understanding the current landscape and likely trajectories of the technology, as well as for designing and implementing policies that can reduce the biggest risks.

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Open roles: Operations team

Blog post by · Published February 27th, 2024

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ goal is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems — we aim to be the world’s best source of support and advice for them on how to do so. That means helping people shift their careers to work on solving problems that are more important, neglected, and solvable — and to pick more promising methods for solving those problems.

We’ve had over 10 million readers on our website, have ~450,000 subscribers to our newsletter and have given 1on1 advice to over 4,000 people. We’re also one of the top ways people who get involved in EA first hear about it, and we’re the most commonly cited factor for ‘getting involved’ in the EA community.

The operations team oversees 80,000 Hours’ HR, recruiting, finances, org-wide metrics, and office management, as well as much of our fundraising, tech systems, and team coordination. We’re also currently overseeing our spinout from Effective Ventures and setup as an independent organisation.

Currently, the operations team has four full-time staff, some part-time staff, and we receive operations support from Effective Ventures. We’re planning to (at least!) double the size of our operations team over the next year.

The roles

These roles would be great for building career capital in operations, especially if you could one day see yourself in a more senior operations role (e.g. specialising in a particular area, taking on management,

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Anonymous answers: What are the biggest misconceptions about biosecurity and pandemic risk?

Article by and · Published February 2024

This is Part One of our four-part series of biosecurity anonymous answers. You can also read Part Two: Fighting pandemics, Part Three: Infohazards, and Part Four: AI and biorisk.

We rank preventing catastrophic pandemics as one of the most pressing problems in the world, and we have advised many of our readers to work in biosecurity to have high-impact careers.

But biosecurity is a complex field, and while the threat is undoubtedly large, there’s a lot of disagreement about how best to conceptualise and mitigate the risks. We wanted to get a better sense of how the people thinking about these threats every day perceive the risks.

So we decided to talk to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to better understand their views.

To make them feel comfortable speaking candidly, we granted the experts we spoke to anonymity. Sometimes disagreements in this space can get contentious, and certainly many of the experts we spoke to disagree with one another. We don’t endorse every position they’ve articulated below.

We think, though, that it’s helpful to lay out the range of expert opinions from people who we think are trustworthy and established in the field. We hope this will inform our readers about ongoing debates and issues that are important to understand — and perhaps highlight areas of disagreement that need more attention.

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Why you might not want to work on nuclear disarmament (and what to work on instead)

Blog post by · Published February 22nd, 2024

In 1955, ten years after Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, and the 130,000 workers of the Manhattan Project built the first atomic bomb, the United States had 2,400 and Russia had 200. At present, the USA has over 3,000, Russia has over 4,000, and China is building an arsenal of hundreds. Most of these are hydrogen bombs many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These modern arsenals no longer require a bomber plane to deliver them — ICBMs can throw bombs around the earth in half an hour. When we sleep, we sleep as targets of nuclear weapons.

A global thermonuclear war would be the most horrifying event to happen in humanity’s history. If cities were targeted, at the very least, tens of millions would instantly die just like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Survivors described the scenes of those explosions as “just like Hell” and “burning as if scorching Heaven.”

Afterwards, hundreds of millions could starve due to economic collapse. It’s also possible the ozone layer would be damaged for years and temperatures would drop us into a nuclear winter. In the worst case scenario, this would render the northern hemisphere uninhabitable for years, causing an existential catastrophe.

Faced with this possible future, why don’t we agree it’s too horrible to allow and find a way to disarm? Since the invention of nuclear weapons,

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#180 – Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated

Podcast by and · Published February 21st, 2024

The World Economic Forum’s global risks survey of 1,400 experts, policymakers, and industry leaders ranked misinformation and disinformation as the number one global risk over the next two years — ranking it ahead of war, environmental problems, and other threats from AI.

And the discussion around misinformation and disinformation has shifted to focus on how generative AI or a future super-persuasive AI might change the game and make it extremely hard to figure out what was going on in the world — or alternatively, extremely easy to mislead people into believing convenient lies.

But this week’s guest, cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, has a very different view on how people form beliefs and figure out who to trust — one in which misinformation really is barely a problem today, and is unlikely to be a problem anytime soon. As he explains in his book Not Born Yesterday, Hugo believes we seriously underrate the perceptiveness and judgement of ordinary people.

In this interview, host Rob Wiblin and Hugo discuss:

  • How our reasoning mechanisms evolved to facilitate beneficial communication, not blind gullibility.
  • How Hugo makes sense of our apparent gullibility in many cases — like falling for financial scams, astrology, or bogus medical treatments, and voting for policies that aren’t actually beneficial for us.
  • Rob and Hugo’s ideas about whether AI might make misinformation radically worse, and which mass persuasion approaches we should be most worried about.
  • Why Hugo thinks our intuitions about who to trust are generally quite sound, even in today’s complex information environment.
  • The distinction between intuitive beliefs that guide our actions versus reflective beliefs that don’t.
  • Why fake news and conspiracy theories actually have less impact than most people assume.
  • False beliefs that have persisted across cultures and generations — like bloodletting and vaccine hesitancy — and theories about why.
  • And plenty more.

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Our new series on building skills

Blog post by · Published February 14th, 2024

If we were going to summarise all our advice on how to get career capital in three words, we’d say: build useful skills.

In other words, gain abilities that are valued in the job market — which makes your work more useful and makes it easier to bargain for the ingredients of a fulfilling job — as well as those that are specifically needed in tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

So today, we’re launching our series on the most useful skills for making a difference — which you can find here. It covers why we recommend each skill, how to get started learning them, and how to work out which is the best fit for you.

Each article looks at one of eight skill sets we think are most useful for solving the problems we think are most pressing:

Why are we releasing this now?

We think that many of our readers have come away from our site underappreciating the importance of career capital.

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#179 – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

Podcast by and · Published February 12th, 2024

Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young people. At any point in time, something like 20% of young people are working through anxiety or depression that’s seriously interfering with their lives — but nowhere near 20% of people in their 20s have severe heart disease or cancer or a similar failure in a key organ of the body other than the brain.

From an evolutionary perspective, that’s to be expected, right? If your heart or lungs or legs or skin stop working properly while you’re a teenager, you’re less likely to reproduce, and the genes that cause that malfunction get weeded out of the gene pool.

So why is it that these evolutionary selective pressures seemingly fixed our bodies so that they work pretty smoothly for young people most of the time, but it feels like evolution fell asleep on the job when it comes to the brain? Why did evolution never get around to patching the most basic problems, like social anxiety, panic attacks, debilitating pessimism, or inappropriate mood swings? For that matter, why did evolution go out of its way to give us the capacity for low mood or chronic anxiety or extreme mood swings at all?

Today’s guest, Randy Nesse — a leader in the field of evolutionary psychiatry — wrote the book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, in which he sets out to try to resolve this paradox.

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#178 – Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting

Podcast by and · Published February 1st, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Emily Oster — economist at Brown University, host of the ParentData podcast, and the author of three hugely popular books that provide evidence-based insights into pregnancy and early childhood.

They cover:

  • Common pregnancy myths and advice that Emily disagrees with — and why you should probably get a doula.
  • Whether it’s fine to continue with antidepressants and coffee during pregnancy.
  • What the data says — and doesn’t say — about outcomes from parenting decisions around breastfeeding, sleep training, childcare, and more.
  • Which factors really matter for kids to thrive — and why that means parents shouldn’t sweat the small stuff.
  • How to reduce parental guilt and anxiety with facts, and reject judgemental “Mommy Wars” attitudes when making decisions that are best for your family.
  • The effects of having kids on career ambitions, pay, and productivity — and how the effects are different for men and women.
  • Practical advice around managing the tradeoffs between career and family.
  • What to consider when deciding whether and when to have kids.
  • Relationship challenges after having kids, and the protective factors that help.
  • And plenty more.

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Announcing Niel Bowerman as the next CEO of 80,000 Hours

Blog post by · Published January 31st, 2024

We’re excited to announce that the boards of Effective Ventures US and Effective Ventures UK have approved our selection committee’s choice of Niel Bowerman as the new CEO of 80,000 Hours.

I (Rob Wiblin) was joined on the selection committee by Will MacAskill, Hilary Greaves, Simran Dhaliwal, and Max Daniel.

80,000 Hours is a project of EV US and EV UK, though under Niel’s leadership, it expects to be spinning out and creating an independent legal structure, which will involve selecting a new board.

We want to thank Brenton Mayer, who has served as 80,000 Hours interim CEO since late 2022, for his dedication and thoughtful management. Brenton expressed enthusiasm about the committee’s choice, and he expects to take on the role of chief operations officer, where he will continue to work closely with Niel to keep 80,000 Hours running smoothly.

By the end of its deliberations, the selection committee agreed that Niel was the best candidate to be 80,000 Hours’ long-term CEO. We think Niel’s drive and attitude will help him significantly improve the organisation and shift its strategy to keep up with events in the world. We were particularly impressed by his ability to use evidence to inform difficult strategic decisions and lay out a clear vision for the organisation.

Niel was very forthcoming and candid with the committee about his weaknesses. His focus on getting frank feedback and using it to drive a self-improvement cycle really impressed the selection committee.

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#177 – Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps

Podcast by and · Published January 24th, 2024

Back in December, we released an episode where Rob Wiblin interviewed Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution podcast — on his takes on the pace of development of AGI and the OpenAI leadership drama, based on his experience red teaming an early version of GPT-4 and the conversations with OpenAI staff and board members that followed.

In today’s episode, their conversation continues, with Nathan diving deeper into:

  • What AI now actually can and can’t do — across language and visual models, medicine, scientific research, self-driving cars, robotics, weapons — and what the next big breakthrough might be.
  • Why most people, including most listeners, probably don’t know and can’t keep up with the new capabilities and wild results coming out across so many AI applications — and what we should do about that.
  • How we need to learn to talk about AI more productively — particularly addressing the growing chasm between those concerned about AI risks and those who want to see progress accelerate, which may be counterproductive for everyone.
  • Where Nathan agrees with and departs from the views of ‘AI scaling accelerationists.’
  • The chances that anti-regulation rhetoric from some AI entrepreneurs backfires.
  • How governments could (and already do) abuse AI tools like facial recognition, and how militarisation of AI is progressing.
  • Preparing for coming societal impacts and potential disruption from AI.
  • Practical ways that curious listeners can try to stay abreast of everything that’s going on.
  • And plenty more.

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